The importance of empathy

Today I indulged myself in one of my travel treats, a copy of Scientific American Mind purchased from the airport boookshop. It’s the September/October edition and the catchy title of the cover story is “The Making of a Psychopath. Why they don’t care: they can’t” . I thought that article would relate to the people I work with..and it did..but that is not where I found the following very long quote about empathy. Here it is

Recent research suggests that a lack of empathy is a handicap when trying to help people with psychological or social problems. In a 2002 quantitative review of numerous studies, psychologist Arthur Bothart, then at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and his colleagues found a correlation between high levels of empathy in therapists and successful outcomes in patients. In a 1992 study, psychiatrist David Burns, then at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and his colleagues used advanced statistical techniques for distinguishing cause and effect and found that a therapist’s ability to empathize not only is correlated with a patient’s progress but also contributes to it. Empathy is the cornerstone of psychotherapy, both because therapists need it to provide useful and relevant guidance and because patients benefit from feeling truly understood. (H. Arkowitz & S.O. Lilinfeld, p65)

 Change “psychotherapy” to “teaching”  in that last sentence and “therapists and patients” to “teachers and students”.

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